"While there may be a delay in candidates selected for appointments in PSU banks getting call letters, they will “get the call letters in due course”, according to Vijayalakshmi R. Iyer, Chairperson and Managing Director, Bank of India (BoI), Mumbai.
She said her bank itself has planned an intake of about 4,500 personnel during the current year, both officers and clerical staff.
Responding to a question during an interaction with the media here on Monday about the reported non-receipt of call letters by thousands of aspirants who had cleared the bank exams and interview, she said “I understand there has been a slight delay in the process. They will be getting the letters in due course.”
She said the banks indicate to the Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS), entrusted with the task of selection, the number of officers they need based on which selection is made. The question of sending call letters may only be “a small aberration” but it would be issued. “I don't see any other reason for it,” she said.
(According to reports, over 60,000 candidates who had qualified for appointment as officers and clerks in PSU banks have not got call letters and their selection might lapse if they failed to get postings before March 2014.)
Commenting on reports of many candidates who had taken up bank jobs but later left them in a short time, Vijayalakshmi Iyer said banks normally recruited about 30 per cent of excess staff than required to meet such contingencies. It was possible that selected candidates might not join a particular bank for some reason. But since they had gone through the entire selection process, it may not be that they did not prefer a banking career itself.
M.V. Nair, former CMD of Union Bank of India, said according to an estimate made by the Dr. Khandelwal Committee, of which he was a member, the public sector banks alone would need about 700,000 new recruits by 2020 in view of the large number of bank staff retiring and the expansion the sector was witnessing because of financial inclusion. This has created a huge need for training the personnel.
Nair, who is the Chairman of Banker's Quotient Academy, said he intended to work with “quite a few banks” by creating a capacity to train to begin with 1,000 bankers at a time in the academy which is coming up at the RVS Group of Institution’s premises at Sulur on the outskirts of Coimbatore. The duration of the training would be structured to meet the specific needs of the banks. If need be, the intake capacity would be enhanced next year.
He said the academy had brought on board Bank of India, Central Bank of India and Corporation Bank for training their staff and was in discussion with three more banks. With regard to the private sector banks, he said discussions were on to customise programmes for them with “two large private sector banks”.
But he would like to take up this responsibility after six months since the needs of the PSU banks were huge and he would prefer not to dilute the focus for at least six months. But involving the private sector banks in the programme was also definitely on the agenda.